Why do we have to dot product in the Low-rank Bilinear Pooling?
The paper (which I was not familiar with) proposes a new pooling method, which they name &quot;Low-rank Bi-linear Pooling&quot;. Because it is a pooling method, its output should be a single value over some input spatial region (the goal of pooling is to down-sample an input representation). They do not want to use the resulting vector from the element-wise multiplication, they want to get a single scalar. Notice their initial formula:
$$
f_{i}=\sum_{j=1}^{N} \sum_{k=1}^{M} w_{i j k} x_{j} y_{k}+b_{i}=\mathbf{x}^{T} \mathbf{W}_{i} \mathbf{y}+b_{i}\label{1}\tag{1}
$$